Wal-Mart grocery to open Aug. 20

Wal-Mart plans to open its newest area store, a Neighborhood Market, in less than two weeks.

The store at 35th Street and Noland Road has been under construction for months at the site of the old Gaslight Square retail strip. It opens at 8 a.m. Aug. 20.

The idea is more streamlined than a regular Wal-Mart.

“We’re a grocery store,” said store manager Aaron Dyer.

The store is open 24/7, and the emphasis is on customers getting to what they need – dinner, for example – and getting out the door quickly, Dyer said.

“It’s a much quicker, calmer experience,” said Dyer, who has been with the company for 16 years and comes to the store after a year and a half at the Wal-Mart SuperCenter on Bolger Drive in Independence.

In addition to grocery items, the store carries health-and-beauty goods and has a drive-through pharmacy.

The store will have up to 95 employees, and the past weeks they have been spent installing fixtures and shelves and, more recently, stocking those shelves, first with goods with the longest shelf lives and, still to come immediately before the opening, dairy and produce.

“We’re getting there,” Dyer said.

The company has about 300 Neighborhood Markets around the country and is adding more rapidly, but this is just the second in Eastern Jackson County. One opened in Blue Springs a little more than a year ago.